Božidar Zečević: On the Film “Saint Moses the Black“
Like Man of God, this is a Christ-like film where man, as the “image of God,” follows the path of the Lord. Although everything looks different, the same power of the Gospel is at work once again. Malik and Saint Moses are the same persona of a penitent on Christ’s path of soul purification, redemption, and humility.
For a director, the second film represents the greatest temptation. Especially if the first one succeeded and attracted attention, as was the case with Man of God (2022)—a work by Belgrade-born Jelena Popović, who lives in America and Greece, promoted at the same place four years ago. The film about the Orthodox saint Nektarios of Aegina and his encounter with God stirred spirits from Los Angeles, New York, and Paris, to Athens and Belgrade. It revitalized Orthodox cinema in times when few would expect it, relying primarily on its artistic strength.
I wondered what would happen with her second film and whether she would manage to remain grounded in her original spiritual perspective. Popović’s Saint Moses the Black (2026), however, surpassed all expectations: the same evangelical foundation permeates both films. Furthermore, at the core of both approaches lies an exceptional cinematic language belonging to today’s time—one that advances and develops in the spirit of new understandings of dramaturgy and directing.
While in the previous film both elements were reduced to minimalistic, ascetic, almost Hesychastic cinematic means, where everything was subordinated to a single Christ-like idea of the narrow path to the Lord in the confinement of an isolated Aegean island, Saint Moses the Black takes place against the backdrop of an explosion of violence. It depicts the mutual destruction of Black gangs in modern-day West Chicago—a world that seems straight out of a Spike Lee movie, featuring bloody clashes, street wars of drug dealers, vagrants from the margins of illegal fighting dens, tattoos, and containers filled with all kinds of waste from an underground microcosm collapsing in convulsions.
Here, raw violence reigns, and human life is worth nothing. But these are not the signs of an Apocalypse from some dystopian underground; they represent a realistic and convincing overground of today’s America. (How a modest, almost translucent, and fragile woman not only survived but triumphed in this hell remains completely beyond my understanding).
In the Labyrinth of Violence
The story centers on a returnee, Malik (Omar Epps), a street dealer gang leader who leaves prison only to immediately plunge into the eternal fire of revenge and retribution for the murder of his best friend. The plot rests upon the durable matrix of the American gangster film, a genre that reached its peak in Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932) before being revived in an underworld environment that becomes an empire of evil in Brian De Palma’s remake half a century later (Scarface, 1983). Now, Saint Moses the Black draws close to them, with all three speaking through an analogous narrative of a pure gangster genre that changes and evolves to follow new trends, yet remains within the boundaries of the same environment.
For the most part, it is a matter of the social margin: in the first case, the old Italian mafia from the Prohibition era of the 1920s; in the second, the Cuban-Colombian cocaine cartels of the 1980s; and in the third, today’s urban Afro-American BLM landscape. This represents the syndrome of marginalized ethnic communities of the 20th and 21st centuries that struggle to fit into the mainstream of “normal” America.
The role of native white Americans is mostly reduced to stereotypes of corrupt police officers or distorted cerberuses of the social establishment. It is a labyrinth of malice, betrayal, and foul, polluted language whose sole content is violence. Popović knows this and handles the genre confidently, in the spirit of the highest Hollywood standards.
Thus, Malik’s dramaturgical counterpoint here is a literal demon of the underworld—a hysterical police officer and pathological prototype of a decaying state, who is the only white character in the film (played by Cliff Chamberlain). This is the character of a bad lieutenant steeped in vice, one from Epstein’s tribe, who refuses to let Malik break free from the stereotype of the perpetual culprit to become a righteous man.
The Mummy of Change
Yet, God’s plan is there. Now comes the second, Christian layer of the film. Malik’s grandmother, the widow of an Eastern Orthodox Church priest, suffers because her grandson has strayed into crime and the realm of evil, viewing it as her life’s failure. In a moving scene of “grandmother’s lunch,” she gives him the only thing she has left: a small icon of the Orthodox saint Moses “the Black” (“who looks like an Ethiopian”). Moses also lived in a world of crime but, upon God’s call, repented, confessed, and lived out his monastic days in the spirit of the Gospel: “He who takes up the sword shall perish by the sword” (Matt. 26:52).
Also a Black man from Nubia and a former robber band leader in the Nile Valley, Saint Moses the Black (330–405 AD) joined the first monastic community in the Wadi El Natrun desert (“Nitrian or Nitrate Valley”) near Alexandria. This was where a ring of isolated sketes—later becoming the first monasteries in Christian history—emerged from refugees fleeing Roman persecutions in the mid-4th century AD.
Fleeing the hand of justice, Moses peacefully studied the holy scriptures from which the New Testament was emerging, finding answers to questions about the meaning of existence and the essence of evil. Ever since he received the icon, this Black saint frequently appears to Malik, calling him to his side. The robber leader begins to falter in committing his evil designs; the Chicago gang views their leader with suspicion, openly protesting and even threatening him with death.
A priest from the Eastern Orthodox Church explains to him that God has chosen him, and that the saint’s constant calls reveal his path toward salvation. The would-be penitent attempts to establish peace with the rival gang, but his own clan opposes it. Malik rushes into a suicidal nightmare, but the divine power within him is stronger, pulling him deep toward the roots of origin.
In Moses’s monastery, Deir al-Baramus (“Monastery of the Romans”—so named because according to tradition, it was founded in 335 AD by Maximus and Domitius, the two sons of Roman Emperor Valentinian I), a Dutch team of archaeologists recently discovered a deeper layer of an ancient Egyptian structure inscribed with hieroglyphs. There, amidst an abundance of potassium nitrate (“saltpeter,” the primary raw material for equipping mummies), the ritual of embalming—the funerary ritual of ancient Egypt—was performed.
Here lies a sudden connection with the very nature of cinema, discovered by the “father of film theory,” André Bazin, in his first and perhaps most important text. In his capital work What is Cinema? (1958), Bazin recognizes film as a consequence of man’s desire to embalm time, i.e., to renew the “mummy complex”. “The Egyptian religion, entirely directed against death,” he writes in his essay The Ontology of the Photographic Image, “linked survival directly to the material duration of the body. In this way, it satisfied a fundamental need of human psychology: to fight against time. To artificially eternalize life. It was natural to save those appearances in the very reality of the dead, in flesh and bone. The first Egyptian statue is a human mummy tanned and petrified with saltpeter… To save a being through appearance… Photography does not create eternity, but embalms time, preserving it from decay”.
But then comes Christ, who reveals that there is no death and that at His second coming, all people will be resurrected in their bodily form. “For the first time, the image of things is an image of duration, a mummy of change.”. Malik and Saint Moses the Black are also united in another great essence of film: the appearance of the living double, i.e., the “symbolic expression of the desire to replace the external world with one’s own double” (Bazin), about which another great film scholar, Edgar Morin, wrote a major study (The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man, 1967).
Just as film is a double of the world, Malik and Saint Moses are, therefore, the same persona of a penitent on Christ’s path of soul purification, redemption, and humility. For them, time plays no role. Their sacrifice is Christ-like. Like Man of God, this is a Christ-like film where man, as the “image of God,” follows the path of the Lord. Although everything looks different, the same power of the Gospel is at work once again.
The Purpose of Every Poetics
Indeed, Malik decides to bring himself to justice, to confess his sins, and then leave himself to inevitable fate. Components purified and liberated from all sin, he, along with his distant ancestor Saint Moses, refuses to defend himself with a sword against the gang of Berbers and Bedouins attacking the monastery, and gladly accepts death by the sword. Ivan Ilyin’s ideas on resisting evil by force have not yet appeared. This is an individual act of an early believer and a path of redemption in the key of original Christianity, which, we see, still works today.
Jelena handles all cinematic tools of the genre brilliantly, energetically guiding her drama and succeeding in merging it into one vast structure that awakens affects, just as in Aristotle and according to all his postulates. Everything—every camera movement, the meticulous organization of space and time, the clear and powerful symbolism in details, every conflict among the actors (excellent actors, who “play themselves”!), every montage cut, and the “director’s touch”—intertwines. The profane is not separated from the sacred; everything acts as a molded whole, and the plot leads to the sublime ideal of every tragedy: catharsis (καθάρсιс), transfiguration.
According to the Stagirite (Aristotle), that is the purpose of every tragedy (read: poetics): healing, curing, redemption, liberation, repentance, penance, humility, deliverance, renewal, transfiguration, and finally, salvation. In Orthodox teaching, later on, a certain hierarchy exists: catharsis – theoria (contemplation) – theosis (vision of God). Sin falls away from the soul, and the Kingdom of Heaven calls us. In humility lies the ultimate goal of Orthodoxy.
If they endure in faith, then the poor will enter the Kingdom sooner than those who seek blessings in vain. Out of all paths, our villain chose the path of his grandmother and Saint Moses the Black. Hence Jelena’s need to invoke the same Gospel once more at the end: “Assuredly, I say to you that tax collectors and harlots enter the kingdom of God before you” (Matt. 21:31). Yet all of this is not a church sermon, but a small masterpiece of popular cinema intended for the theater.
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